Once you have paced another person, established rapport and shown that you understand where they are coming from, then you have a chance to lead them. Leading is when you use the influence that you have built up from pacing. You cannot lead a person unless they are willing to be led and people are not willing to be led unless they have first been adequately paced.
To extend the metaphor, once you have walked at someone’s pace so that they are comfortable, you can change your pace to one that suits you better and they will be more likely to follow your lead.
Pacing Yourself
You also need to pace yourself. Sometimes we are quick to apply NLP skills to others, but not to ourselves. Often we do not respect or try to understand our own experience but expect to be able to change dramatically with little preparation. Pacing your own experience is paying attention to the intuitions you have about others, looking after yourself when you feel ill rather than soldiering on regardless, and appreciating the present moment rather than jumping into future plans and outcomes too quickly.
Pacing is the equivalent of understanding the present state in order to build a more appropriate and empowering desired state.
For any successful change in yourself or others, pace … then … lead.
| MATCHING AND MISMATCHING |  |
You pace and build rapport through ‘matching’. Matching is when you mirror and complement an aspect of another person. It is not copying, it is more like a dance. When you match, you show you are willing to enter the other person’s model of the world. They will intuitively perceive this and so you can feel more at ease with them and they will feel more at ease with you.
Matching can be done at every neurological level.
The Environment
Rapport at this level is usually superficial and comes from working in the same building or for the same company. Here you match other people’s expectations about dress code and personal appearance. For example you would not go into a business meeting without being properly dressed in business clothes, as you would lose credibility immediately. Sharing interests and friends also helps to build rapport at this level.
Rapport on the environmental level is often the first point of contact. It ‘gets you in the door’.
Behaviour
Matching at the behaviour level means matching another person’s movements while maintaining your own identity and integrity. It is like a musical duet – two people do not play the same tune, they harmonize to produce something greater. Look around in restaurants or parties where people are meeting socially and you will see that they intuitively match body language, particularly eye contact. Very good friends will often be seen in very similar postures and lovers will stare into each other’s eyes and often breathe in unison.
There are three important elements to matching on the behavioural level: body language, voice tone and language.
You can gain rapport by matching:
breathing pattern
posture
gestures
eye contact
You can match:
speed of speech
volume of speech
rhythm of speech
characteristic sounds (e.g. coughs, sighs and hesitations)
Matching voice tone is very useful for building rapport on the telephone, where you only have the auditory channel, so voice tone and words are all you have to build rapport.
Non-verbal matching is far more powerful than verbal agreement. We set more store by a person’s non-verbal behaviour than their words. When the two conflict, we tend to believe the non-verbal part of the message. For example, ‘That’s lovely!’ said with a sneering voice tone or ‘I am interested!’ while looking at your watch will give the opposite impression to the words spoken. You can verbally disagree with someone and keep rapport if you match their body language as you do so.
Be careful, however, of matching body language too closely. You can get good rapport simply by making sure you do not mismatch. In other words, adopt a posture that is similar but not exactly the same. Give the same amount of eye contact as the other person, though, because this is what they feel comfortable with. Lots of eye contact is not necessarily a good thing!
We do body and voice matching naturally and unconsciously. Some very interesting research was done by William Condon in the 1960s into what he called ‘cultural microrhythms’. He analysed short videotapes of people talking together and broke them down into thousands of frames. What he found (which has been confirmed by subsequent researchers) was that the gestures were harmonized and so was the rhythm of the conversation. Volume and pitch fell into balance and the speech rate – the number of speech sounds per second – equalized. The period of time that lapsed between the moment one speaker stopped talking and another speaker began (the latency period) also equalized.
You can match:
key words and phrases that designate values (for example when you summarize to check for agreement)
words that show how a person is thinking
These are called predicates. They show that a person may be visualizing, hearing mental sounds or voices, or paying attention to feelings. By matching predicates, you show the other person that you respect their way of thinking.
Matching behaviour needs skill and respect. It must be done out of an honest desire to understand another person’s model of the world. Simply mimicking body language is indiscriminate copying without respect and will lose you rapport very fast indeed as soon as the other person notices. And they will.
Often the best way to gain rapport at the behaviour level is simply to avoid badly mismatching (e.g. do not stand if the other person is sitting, do not talk quickly if the other person is a slow speaker, do not speak loudly if they have a soft voice). Be comfortable and congruent yourself when you match other people’s behaviour. Do not match anything that you feel uneasy about.
You can match one aspect of a person’s body language with a different part of yours if this feels more comfortable. This is called ‘crossover matching’. For example, you might match the rhythm of a person’s breathing with a small movement of your hand.
Capabilities
This level of rapport comes from shared skills and interests. Sporting competitors, teammates and fellow professionals can all have rapport at this level. When you are good at what you do, others in the same field will respect you. This particularly applies to professional situations. Environmental and behavioural matching will go so far, but then you need to demonstrate that you are competent in order to build and maintain rapport when there is a shared task to be done.
Beliefs and Values
You build powerful rapport by respecting and understanding the beliefs and values of another person. You do not need to agree with them, only respect what is important to them.
Values are not logical, they cannot be justified with reason, but they are not unreasonable.